Google appears to be showing its ai-generated search results less frequently in recent weeks, according to a recent study by an SEO firm.
The data collected ai-Overviews-June2024″>by BrightEdge and reported on ai-overviews-visibility-new-low-444048″>by Land of search enginessuggests that ai Overviews went from appearing in 11 percent of queries on June 1 to 7 percent of queries on June 30. BrightEdge data also indicates that ai Overviews cite Reddit and Quora dramatically less than before.
Since the launch of ai Overviews in May, Google has had to make changes to address strange results like recommending you put glue on pizza (which appears to have been lifted from a Reddit thread) and suggesting that eat rocks (Apparently taken from an article in The onion). In response, Google defended ai Overviews but said it had implemented adjustments, such as limiting the use of user-generated content in ai Overviews and adding better tools to detect nonsensical queries that should not appear in ai Overviews.
Google spokeswoman Ashley Thompson says: The edge Thompson also said the BrightEdge study appears to mix up users who have opted into “ai Overviews & More” as part of Google Search Labs’ experimental features and those who haven’t. (People who have opted into ai Overviews in Search Labs will see them in more search results, according to Thompson.)
“We designed ai overviews to appear for queries where they are useful and provide value beyond the existing features on the results page, and they continue to appear for a large number of searches,” Thompson said. “As we’ve shared, we’re continuing to refine when and how we display ai overviews to make them as useful as possible, including a number of recent technical updates to improve the quality of answers.”
ai overviews are a major initiative for Google. If people don’t like or trust them, they might turn to competing products from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity, which could be a big loss for the search engine. Google is bullish on ai overviews (CEO Sundar Pichai said people “are responding very positively to ai overviews” in a May interview with editor-in-chief Nilay Patel), but the company is still making some adjustments.
